Yesterday citizens gathered to mourn the Chartist mural. It was not totally unlike the mourning coronation of the baby king after the disaster of Flodden exactly 500 years ago in Scotland.

We had lost the mural but we were not giving up. In an eloquent speech, Peter Rawcliffe credited South Wales with the creation of modern democracy which was then exported to the world. It was a fair point. Greece usually gets the credit, but Greek democracy was too restricted to be much use.

Claims made yesterday were that schools and parents brought children from fifty or sixty miles away to see the Chartist mural. A boy who had been brought to see the mural on Thursday watched the destruction with tears running down his face. The police had not known the mural was to be destroyed until that morning. One policeman had tears in his eyes. Some of the police tried to prevent it.

The Argus' front page showed a pile of rubble over the headline 'Who gave the order?' It's even been said that the council are trying to deny responsibility. It wasn't them! So who was it Gremlins, moonbats, purple pixies from outer space or the Flying Spaghetti Monster?

Somebody told me that he thought the council was motivated by two things, money and not wanting to let people tell them what to do. But they have been elected to represent the people, not to find out what they want and then do the opposite.

The wire meshing around Ground Zero has been decorated with flowers, socks and reproachful banners. Special mention must be given to the slogan: 'Bob Bright/Piece of Shite!'

If Bob Bright is the malefactor, few people can have been less appropriately named. What worse PR could he have created, especially at the time of the food festival?

Someone told me how he buttonholed the mayor to tell him, ''You're full of shit!" which sounds about right. I have spoken to two people, though, who believed implicitly the council's story that the wall was unsafe and that it would have cost 600 k to remove the mural gently.

I'm no conspiracy theorist who disbelieves authority figures automatically. But the council has told so many mutually contradictory stories. They can't all be true and it's unlikely that any of them are.

Given the devious and secretive method of destruction, it may well be that a civil or criminal case could be brought. This is not what 'The Bells of Rhymny' envisaged. When Peter Seegar sang "Put the vandals in court/Say the bells of Newport", that was not what he had in mind, but it would be funny if it was ironically prophetic.

Last edited by marianneh on Fri Nov 10, 2017 8:42 am; edited 1 time in total